Pirate Bay Founder Helped Wikileaks On Several Fronts

The Pir­ate Bay doc­u­ment­ary TPB AFK high­lights some under-repor­ted details about the con­nec­tion between the Bit­Tor­rent site and Wikileaks. Among oth­er things, Pir­ate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm was cred­ited for his involve­ment in get­ting the “Col­lat­er­al Murder” video out to the pub­lic. Daniel Dom­scheit-Berg, the former spokes­man of WikiLeaks, fur­ther recalls trav­el­ling to Sweden with Juli­an Assange to pay server fees . A meet­ing he will not for­get any­time soon.

TPB AFK: The Pir­ate Bay Away From Key­board is a unique doc­u­ment­ary about three totally dif­fer­ent indi­vidu­als with per­son­al­it­ies that often clashed. They had their own motives for becom­ing involved in The Pir­ate Bay, and defen­ded them till the bit­ter end.

Gottfrid Svartholm, the young­est of the three, made the news last year when he was depor­ted from Cam­bod­ia to Sweden, where he’s cur­rently serving his pris­on sen­tence for his involve­ment in The Pir­ate Bay.

In the film Gottfrid comes across as a witty per­son who likes to chal­lenge the status quo. Known online as Ana­kata, he can be cred­ited for many of the bold responses to copy­right hold­ers that are still pub­lished in Pir­ate Bay’s leg­al threats sec­tion.

Gottfrid also foun­ded Inter­net com­pany PRQ which provided host­ing to many con­tro­ver­sial sites includ­ing Wikileaks. In TPB AFK this con­nec­tion is brought up as well, with Daniel Dom­scheit-Berg say­ing that Juli­an Assange has a lot of respect for the Pir­ate Bay founder.

The former Wikileaks spokes­man recalls that he and Juli­an Assange made a quite an unusu­al trip to Sweden to hand over the host­ing fees in 2008. The Wikileaks duo were sur­prised by Gottfrid appar­ent para­noia, and Dom­scheit-Berg remem­bers it as one of the weirdest exper­i­ences he ever had.

“He came to the hotel. And had someone wait­ing out­side in a car. They had some kind of agree­ment that Gottfrid would always be near a win­dow. So he stood there in the lobby and behaved really strange. Every half a minute he turned around to see if the guy in the car was still there,” Dom­scheit-Berg explains.

Gottfrid declined an offer to hang out for a drink, simply accep­ted the money and which he took off quickly.

How­ever, Gottfrid’s deal­ings with Wikileaks didn’t stop at provid­ing host­ing ser­vices. Togeth­er with oth­er people con­nec­ted to The Pir­ate Bay he helped out the whistle-blower site on sev­er­al fronts. Most pub­licly he assisted in the pub­lic­a­tion of the “Col­lat­er­al Murder” video, which some regard as Wikileak’s big break.

At the end of the Wikileaks video the Pir­ate Bay founder is lis­ted as part of the “decryp­tion and trans­mis­sion team” and cred­ited for “net­work­ing.” While the exact nature of his con­tri­bu­tion remains unknown, it is no secret that Gottfrid is an encryp­tion spe­cial­ist and that the leaked foot­age had to be decryp­ted before it was of any use.

A Pir­ate Bay insider informs Tor­rent­Freak that sev­er­al Pir­ate Bay “asso­ci­ates” did work for Wikileaks.

“Let’s say we were really good friends once upon a time. The ori­gin­al idea of Wikileaks is really close to that of The Pir­ate Bay, as you know.”

Our source fur­ther con­firms that Gottfrid was con­nec­ted to oth­er Wikileaks endeavors, albeit min­im­ally, and that it is “not improb­able” that his con­tri­bu­tions were related to crypto activ­it­ies.

“Ana­kata has always been involved ‘lightly’ in all pro­jects. Just as with The Pir­ate Bay, he didn’t really do a lot, because he had so many oth­er things to do. He can’t focus on one thing,” we were told.

Unlike oth­ers con­nec­ted to Wikileaks the Pir­ate Bay founder appears to get most sat­is­fac­tion from dis­play­ing his skills, rather than dis­play­ing him­self. With a con­stant drive to solve new puzzles and break down bar­ri­ers, the estab­lish­ment is a nat­ur­al enemy.